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“André Malraux: One Man’s Fate”

Hitchens’ review of Olivier Todd’s Malraux: A Life. He criticizes the biographer for spending too much time on Malraux’s life and not enough to the novels. He writes, “ …‘the novel’…published in 1933…did for fiction what Harold Isaacs’s Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution did for scholarship,”

as if it’s obvious who Harold Isaac is and or what his book did or did not do for scholarship. Hitchens then foes on to do nothing but talk about Malraux’s life, also with little additional comments on his novels.

The gist of the matter is that Malraux was a supporter of French, Chinese and Soviet Communism and a pathological fabricator. Hitchens writes, “Malraux was…a writer of fiction, and of quasi-fictional memoirs that he hoped would be taken literally.” Later, he continues, “Malraux was such a fantasist that he would have paid handsomely for a forged narrative that was designed to deceive himself. He invented a relationship with Mao. He exaggerated his role in the Spanish Civil War. He fabricated a glorious past in the French Resistance.”

Why would I ever read one of his books, let alone this biography?

Evidently, all of Malraux's fabrications about his life were not enough to keep him off of a French stamp:

New learning: The English translation of the title for Malraux’s most famous novel, La Condition Humaine, is not the literal, “The Human Condition” but, instead, is Man’s Fate.

New word: arriviste = a ruthlessly self-seeking person